For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).

Requirements

BBEdit 8.6.1 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. If you’re still using Mac OS X 10.3.9, BBEdit 8.5.2 is the most recent version you will be able to run.

This version is a Universal application: it runs natively on both Intel-based and PowerPC-based Macs.

Additions

BBEdit now has syntax coloring for the “.strings” file format used in Mac OS X software projects.

You can reverse which side of the window the documents drawer will open on by holding the Command key down while clicking on the documents drawer icon in the toolbar. (This is a temporary change for that specific window – it doesn’t affect the application preference.)

Added support for the LaTeX command “\verb”, wherein the character immediately after the command becomes the start delimiter of an inline verbatim ‘run’, and the next occurrence of that character closes the run. See NASA GISS: Help On LaTeX \verb for more info. (Verbatim runs and environments suppress recognition of commands, comments, math, everything except whatever ends the run/environment.)

Changes

The About box now displays an appropriate notice if a site license or KeyServer managed license has been used to activate BBEdit.

Changed the rules slightly for “Apply Text Factory” so that if there’s a single-line selection that ends in a carriage return, the selection is processed instead of the entire document.

Fixes

Fixed a bug where after a certain sequence of steps, the insert clipping panel could come up blank.

Fixed a bug in the Format tool where

In selection only mode, the wrong range of text was replaced.

In full document mode, the selection range wasn’t recomputed correctly.

Fixed the cause of 13601 errors when “Make backup before saving” is configured to use the parent directory.

Fixed bug in which JSP files would cause the HTML scanner to hang.

Fixed a fat finger-O which caused results browsers to be omitted from the search sources drawer.

Fixed a regression in Open Selection where ./file, ../file, and folder/file relative paths were not properly resolved.

Fixed hang with empty package declaration (easily triggered by typing ‘package’ in a new Java file).

Skip guessing when saving empty files, if the language module’s “Always Guess” flag is set and there’s a already a successful suffix-to-language match.

Antialiased the diamonds used in the status bar to indicate content and state dirtiness.

TeX: starred commands* now fold correctly. So a \begin*{something} will correctly fold to the matching \end{something}.

TeX: The tokens for generic commands (those which don’t delimit fold ranges or math sections) were always one character short, which messed up syntax coloring in some cases.

JavaScript: Fixed crash which would sometimes occur when trying to find the full name of an “assigned” function or object, and the name was the first text in the file.

Major performance boost for TeX syntax coloring.

The BBLMLanguageCode key in language modules is supposed to be four characters long, and BBEdit 8.5 enforced this (with the result that some third-party codeless language modules no longer loaded). The enforcement came at the cost of backward compatibility, though, so the old behavior of padding shorter language codes with spaces has been restored.

Fixed a problem where Open By Name would find files in front window’s directory tree in preference to your search paths

Fixed a related problem where the default website was not searched, and the front window’s directory tree was

Generic classes and interfaces would cause Java files to have an empty function popup and no fold ranges.

Various Markdown fixes.

Perforce support works with password-less depots.

Fixed bug in the TeX parser which would cause creeping memory use and attendant performance problems while editing TeX source files

When editing text within a TeX verbatim environment, the verbatim-ness of the current range could be lost, in which case content within (and after) the verbatim environment might be inappropriately colored.

Fixed the proximate cause of a crash in the Java function scanner.

TeX verbatim environments now get fold ranges, as they were always meant to.

Corrected version number in the first-run dialog’s title (by removing it).

Fixed bug in which multiple file descriptors were created for opened folders in a Disk Browser window.

Fixed a pair of memory leaks in the TeX scanner that contributed to a perceived performance problem.

Fixed pair of bugs in which the “Reset All” button in the language-specific “Reset to Defaults” dialog didn’t do anything, and the “Reset” button would typically reset the options for the wrong settings group.

Fixed a crash when running the HTML optimizer from a text factory.

Fixed bug in which spell checking didn’t work in TeX documents. Please note that verbatim and math sections will not be spell checked, regardless.

Fixed bug in which a backslash followed by a space in a TeX document would interfere with syntax coloring in the rest of the document.

Fixed bug which could lead to performance problems when editing a math string that ended with a \command in a TeX document.